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Pacific Rim Uprising Director Reveals Deleted Reference to The Thing

Pacific Rim Uprisingalmost included a homage to John Carpenter's horror classic The Thing. The Thing was a remake of the 1951 B-movie The Thing From Another World and followed a team of scientists in the Antarctic who uncover the body of an alien creature with the ability to absorb and replicate living beings. The being soon thaws out and infects the base, leading to paranoia and one incredibly dark ending.

While The Thing is considered a masterpiece now, it was roundly hated by critics and even horror fans upon release in 1982. The director links the movie's failure to E.T., another movie about an alien that comes to Earth. Spielberg's adventure came out two weeks before The Thing, and its heartwarming message was the exact opposite of its bleak, apocalyptic rival. The Thing has also been lauded for its still incredible practical special effects, which depict the body ripping, flesh contorting abilities of the title monster.

Pacific Rim Uprising almost included a scene with a visual reference to The Thing, where the head tears off of an infected scientist before sprouting legs like a spider and trying to flee. Director Steven S. DeKnight has revealed in an interview with Den Of Geek that he wanted to include a similar moment, but decided to trim it for pacing reasons:

There was an action scene that I came up with during the Shatterdome attack that I loved. It was my beloved child, but I was like, 'Ah right. Okay, it's going on a bit too long.' Jake and Lambert were actually gonna make it inside Gypsy, and they were gonna fight one of the Kaiju drones, and they were gonna punch it so hard that it knocked its brain out. The brain was gonna fall to the ground, sprout legs and teeth, and try to eat the cadets.

It was my nod to John Carpenter's The Thing. But once we got in, it was like, not only was it massively expensive and taken more time shooting, it's like a top hat on top of a derby. It's just, let's focus on the story. Sometimes you can just go off on tangents that are great and wonderful, but the aggregate of too much is that the audience just gets exhausted.

While it would have been a fun shout out to The Thing if this moment had been left in, DeKnight probably made the right call. The attack by the Kaiju/Jaeger hybrids goes on long enough, and this brief moment of creature madness wouldn't have added much. That said, these hybrids feel like an interesting concept that wasn't fully flesh out in Uprising, so maybe the scene could have explored some more of their outlandish abilities.

While Pacific Rim Uprising didn't quite receive the warm reviews of Guillermo del Toro's original, it still proved to be an entertaining blockbuster that further displayed the star power of John Boyega. The movie ended with a tease for a third movie, but time will tell if the film does enough business to warrant another adventure. Steven S. DeKnight has also revealed he has an idea to merge Pacific Rim with the Legendary's MonsterVerse in the next entry - should the studio want it to happen.